Dressed head to toe in black, Italian avant-garde minimalistic designer Claudia Ligari met with me in Covent Garden on a moody smog of an English evening. Claudia, who studied at Instituto Marangoni in Milan moved to this ol’ town having struggled at job interviews due to her western European taste. For someone so Italian at heart her fashion is an antithesis to their style: monochrome, strong and edgy.

Fashion was a natural progression for Claudia, “my approach to fashion was always quite slow, I come from a really small town where people don’t know anything about fashion. I think it was something that I had within myself really, I was really fussy as a kid. I always wanted my mum to buy me what I wanted, my shopping trips were hell for my mum” Even once she had moved to Milan to study fashion she remained unsure as to what she wanted to do within fashion not knowing about pattern making, designers or sewing.

In Claudia’s world designing goes the other way to that taught in design schools. Because of this she struggled through her design education but thinks it is definitely important that a designer knows how to do it, “I just see something, then I sketch into it, or it can be a fabric I see. Sometimes I buy 10m of fabric and I don’t even know what I’m going to make with it. Sometimes I dream about something and I wake up in the morning, and I just sketch into it.” Designing seems to be something that comes naturally to Claudia. Her main purpose of designing is to not only make people look good and provide timeless pieces for her woman, but to also do something that she really loves and is extremely passionate about.

Her design philosophy is to create something beautiful that will stand the test of time otherwise it doesn’t make sense to her. “My philosophy is to do something that is beautiful and going to last in time,” Talking more about her woman, she epitomizes her consumer with the iconic Tilda Swinton,”I really love her. I think she’s beautiful. She is absolutely beautiful. So I think someone like her that looks a little bit androgynous and has a strong personality: she may be an actress, journalist, photographer, architect, but she definitely does something that involves art”

In the future, despite starting her business outside of Italy she’d like to move her manufacturing there for the quality and set up a studio in Berlin. She loves London for the freedom of the city, “I can walk down the street wearing my pants on my head and no-one will say anything, it’s just amazing.” However she also loves a lot of European cities and countries as she shares more taste with them and is really inspired by Antwerp. Despite taste differences with Italy she’s a very European woman at heart and soul, but misses the attitude towards life that Italy experiences. The culture, the food, the enjoyment found in life. “Here unfortunately British people, they tend to work too much and they don’t enjoy life, so they don’t enjoy sitting at the table and having a nice meal and staying for a couple of hours and talking about many other things that is not related to work.” The current aim though for her business is to get more people enjoying her work by obtaining more stockists worldwide. If she could manage a family on the side and have some children too, that she informs me, would too be ideal, To view more from Claudia, visit her website.